Pat Willard speaks about her new book America Eats! (photo by Michael Dashkin)

August 8, 2008
Finally we are getting around to recapping the BBQ last Sunday (perhaps because it took us that long to emerge from our food coma), in which Pat Willard made remarks about her new book, America Eats!: On the Road with the WPA, The Fish Fries, Box Supper Socials, and Chitlin Feasts That Define Real American Food. With dozens of admirers on hand, we ate pork sandwiches (topped with coleslaw) prepared by the author's Bay Ridge neighbor, Rich. Though several trays were prepared--along with a hot potato salad mixed according to a Eudora Welty recipe--all was consumed in a rapid fire two hours.

Pat's book brings back to life a forgotten enterprise of the WPA, an offshoot of the Federal Writers' Project in which writers were put to work recording the foodways of America during the Depression. Languishing in archives and libraries ever since (they were never collected or published as originally intended), Pat both resurrected these pieces and revisited the locations depicted by writers like Welty, Ralph Ellison, and Saul Bellow. As BBQs figure prominently in the original project--an American tradition that has not diminished with time (though the rising cost of meat can't help)--Pat chose to turn the book discussion into a communal event. And that may be the point in the first place. The Federal Writers Project sought not only to put unemployed writers to work, but also to celebrate regional differences and the ways in which communities come together. Food, it's no surprise, is one of the great unifiers.

And where there is food, Pat discovered, there is politics. Not just in the sense that these portraits were commissioned (and ultimately abandoned) by the government, but in the opportunities food socials gave to campaigning politicians. In particular, BBQs in the South often became handy rallies, as the smells of slow cooked pork drew more locals than any loudspeaker could. Pat also makes the point that the messy, outdoor, and democratic nature of a BBQ made a politician look like one of the people. So in that spirit we encouraged Daniel Squadron, who is running for State Senate office, to say a few words. But rather than take the stump (or the bait) his remarks were brief and well chosen for the occasion, demurring from "working" the backyard in the sense we are accustomed to from an opportunistic politician. For that he has won our vote. It's a far cry from the BBQs of the 1930s, as this Georgia correspondent caught:

If the guests at a political barbeque are seated, the speakers of the occasion are "spotted" among them, so that the audience is addressed from every angle. After such a meal, the people are likely to be drowsy, and the speeches must be as fiery as the barbeque sauce to arouse them to attention. And usually they are. Here the oratory of the old South comes back. Shouted exhortations, stinging irony, anecdotes with local humor, the sentiment that strikes close to home and heart--all are there.

Daniel praised the book and passed the coleslaw, celebrating a public works project that revealed government involvement at its best. But who knows what the coming recession may demand of our public officials?

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Michael Chabon interviews Oakley Hall on the Berkley campus (Feb 6, 2008)

Today on the way to the store I found a mass market edition of an out of print novel called Corpus of Joe Bailey. The cover is striking and unique for the time--lacking the kind of sensation typical of pocket books in the '50s. The illustration of a man with furrowed brow staring back at the reader is remarkably straightforward and blunt. Here's an intimate book about a serious protagonist. The single "sexy" cover quote is downplayed, though the back jacket does yield to a Kansas City reviewer's overheated prose: "One of the big novels...big physically, big in sin, big in conception and execution."

But what drew me to the book wasn't the jacket design but the author. I've never read Oakley Hall, but knew he was one of the few to receive public praise from Thomas Pynchon--and one of even a smaller clique whom Pynchon acknowledged as an influence on his own writing career. Warlock, considered Hall's masterpiece and the book Pynchon and his buddy Richard Farina championed, is now reissued by the New York Review of Books. But Corpus of Joe Bailey is forgotten, except in obituaries as the greatest book to be written about San Diego. Perhaps it's the curse of being an unabashed West Coast writer. You will always be damned with faint praise by the New York literary establishment.

Somehow I think there's more to it than that, and hopefully we can learn more about the book in the coming weeks--please write in with your thoughts or impressions. We'd also like to hear from Hall's numerous proteges, who include Michael Chabon and Richard Ford. If you ever took classes with Hall at UC Irvine or elsewhere, speak up. Watch the video above to hear Chabon's heartfelt conversation with Hall mere months before his death in May. It sheds some light on Chabon's own dexterity at bending genres--something Hall had been doing for years.
--Peter Miller